William Dalrymple on New Delhi’s British Spell

One of the favorite pastimes of the British in Delhi was jackal hunting, a local substitute for fox hunting. Pictured, Col. Sahni, Master of the Hunt, leads the hounds in Delhi.

For most of their time in India, the British didn’t care much for Delhi. They remembered it as the home of the Mughals and for the 1857 mutiny of Indian soldiers, which was brutally repressed.

It was only when King George V announced the capital would move from Kolkata to Delhi in 1911 that they took greater interest in the city, later rechristening it New Delhi. For the next 36 years, as its newest layer was being built, the city was briefly the political and social hub of British India.

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William Dalrymple

British historian and writer William Dalrymple, whose books include “City of Djinns” and “White Mughals,” spoke to the Journal about Delhi’s jackal-hunting and Marmite days. Edited excerpts.

Wall Street Journal: What attracted the British to Delhi?

Dalrymple: There was not much enthusiasm for Delhi itself, but there was a great enthusiasm among the British to move out of Kolkata, which no one ever liked. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, the British regarded Kolkata with horror, a place full of rich, educated Bengalis with revolutionary tendencies. There is a lot of snide, nasty, racist stuff being written about the Bengalis and Kolkata by the British in this period.

As far as they think of Delhi at all, they think of it as having a better climate and it being associated with the rather glamorous Mughals. There was also its strategic position, which has always been the great thing about Delhi, being right in the center of India but close enough to Afghanistan to control the troubles coming down from the Khyber Pass. We often forget that the 1919 Afghan invasion from the Khyber Pass happened at the same time as Delhi was being built.

Dalrymple: The British moved into the Civil Lines, which was the semi-Apartheid British colony north of the old city. They lived in large bungalows and had lots of servants and large gardens.

The British loved their sports, and there are lots of reports of the time of hunting jackals, monsoon picnics at the Qutub Minar and going riding into the ruins.

The centers of British social life were the Gymkhana Club and what is now the Oberoi Maidens Hotel. It had a dance hall, where lots of balls were thrown.

WSJ: What was their social background?

Dalrymple: The British people living in Delhi were exclusively the civil service, which by this stage was very meritocratic.

They tended to be, as they had always been since the 1850s, middle-class kids, often from Scotland and Ulster [a province in northern Ireland] who were willing to take the long exile of living abroad: younger sons, children of vicars, people who didn’t have land or landed interests. It was still regarded as a bit of an exile.